#CecilTheLion: What If We Find Out Cecil Wasn’t Poached?

Unless you live under a rock, there is no way in Hades that you have not heard of Cecil the Lion’s dreadful demise.

Matter of fact, there has been such an international uproar over his killing that Obama is now slated to do the eulogy at Cecil’s funeral. It’s also been reported that Michelle has already contacted Cecil’s pride to give them her and Barack’s condolences. It’s true. Tell everyone.

Now, before I give you my two cents as a big game hunter on the Cecil situation, right before I sat down to bang out this screed my editor pointed out to me that she just posted on my entertainment site, RedHotChaCha.com, pics of two male, Cecil-looking-lions, catching and killing a magnificent kudu bull.

It was disgusting. How could lions team up on such a gorgeous antelope and be so mean? How could this happen? I’ve never beheld lions behaving like that in a movie. According to Disney and the like, lions, warthogs and various plains game animals sing “Hakuna Matata” together.

As you will see (if you clicked the link) the lions chased the kudu down, weaving in and out of vehicles, as car loads of animal lovers with their children watched in horror as The Ghost and The Darkness broke the noble kudu bull’s neck and then commenced to crunch and munch on it in front of them like Larry The Cable Guy would a platter of nachos at a Hooter’s Macho Nacho Blow Out.

It was so sad, folks. It almost made me renounce my religion. I felt led to start a Twitter hashtag campaign I titled #KuduLivesMatter in homage to the murdered bull. It also made me say to my self, “Self, I wonder if the sweet, tender, lovable and damn near human-like lion that we call ‘Cecil’ ever scared, bit and/or ultimately murdered, in a grueling and truly terrifying fashion, the food he masticated upon?” Surely not, because Cecil is our official Saint Hello Kitty and he would never ever harm or hunt an animal down like he was hunted, would he? Huh?

Being an inquiring mind I wanted to know if lions’ chasing down game, scaring the crap out of it and then viciously killing it is common practice amongst the Panthera Leo’s; and boy, oh boy … did I land on a stack of vicious videos of lions doing some uber-nasty shenanigans to their fellow four footed fauna.

Some PETA reps would call what the lions did “evil“ because it sure as heck wasn’t an ethical way to treat an animal. Nature is a serial killer. Fo’ real, y’all.

Befuddled, I continue to investigate further and watched several other videos of lions’ eating cape buffalo calves, cows and older bulls; blue wildebeests and helpless zebras; some were actually still alive. Hello! That ain’t right. I’ve never seen that bloody display on Nickelodeon orSaved By The Bell re-runs. How can this be? Because … apparently … it be. And it be bloody, filled with suffering, screams and death bellows all doled out to innocent, beautiful animals, via some dead-ringers of Cecil The Lion. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?

Speaking of being not nice, my buddy Shaun sent me a link to man-eating lions actually killing black Zimbabweans around Lake Kariba. That was heinous. I thought #BlackLivesMatter? Apparently not to lions or Twitterers because I haven’t heard squat from them regarding these jacked up fatal maulings. We should ban lions because they’re vicious to the animal kingdom and to blacks.

Ok, I’ll stop being a cheeky douche in pointing out how daft the PETA types are and give you what I really think about the Cecil scenario.

This is what I’ve been able to deduce from true sources who are “in the know” and not some Facebook warrior going hashtag nuts with the Cecil movement while also viewing Asian midget porn.

Check it out…

As of last Friday, According to my sources it looked like the professional hunter and the black Zimbabwean landowner did not have a lion on quota and therefore the taking of Cecil, or any lion for that matter, on the Antoinette farm that bordered The Hwange National Park was illegal meaning … he poached it. And hunters, especially, hate poachers. I. Mean. Hate.

That said, Saturday afternoon Theo Bronkhorst, the professional hunter who guided Walter Palmer on this hunt has now come out swinging saying in his first interview, “I don’t believe I failed in any duties at all, I was engaged by a client to do a hunt for him and we shot an old male lion that I believed was past his breeding age. We had obtained the permit for bow hunting, we had obtained the permit for the lion from the council. We had done everything above board. I don’t foresee any jail sentence at all, I think it’s been blown out of proportion by social media and I think it’s been a deliberate ploy to ban all hunting and especially lion hunting in Zimbabwe.

So, if we find out, as the investigation unfolds, that the landowner, PH and the hunter did not shoot Cecil illegally then I think they’re due a massive apology from Matt Lauer, Jimmy Kimmel and all the other Twitter # warriors for ruining their lives before waiting for all the facts to come out.

Finally, if one wants to really get pissy, they should seek to overthrow Zim’s President Robert Mugabe because that son-of-a-bitch, along with his generals and ministers, have truly decimated Zimbabwe’s wildlife with his brutal and greedy, iron fist.

For more from Doug on Cecil the Lion, check out this interview on Newsmax TV where Pete Riva, a wildlife expert, and author Doug Giles discuss the international attention focused on the killing of Cecil the lion and the debate over big game hunting.

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